Eventually my Web site will have extensive pictures with commentary from Italy, Brazil, Poland, and Hong Kong and China, all made public through links. For now, here are some from China, just for friends. Click on each image for a larger version.

  
The non stop flight from Chicago to Hong Kong went over the Arctic Ocean, close to the North Pole. I was fascinated by the massive irregular fissures in the polar ice cap, which I'd read of, caused by the pressures of undersea currents.

I spent some time biking around Hong Kong's container port, one of the world's largest, observing the automated cranes that move containers about. Biking in an area where no one would has its own odd pleasures.

    
My first stop in China was Dunhuang, in the northwest, mostly to see the famous Mogao Caves, which mostly date from between 360 A. D. to about 1300. They were hollowed out from a cliff, each cave taking a decade or more to construct, by an oasis in the Gobi desert which was on an early Buddhist pilgrimage route to India, and many are decorated with sculptures and wall paintings. They are said to be the most important site for early Buddhist painting in China — and the art within them is quite amazing, really great. Photography inside the caves isn't permitted, but a Google images search will produce many hits, including one especially good site.

Afraid of getting lost, I made my first trip to the Mogao Caves by taxi; though it was almost 30 km each way, and though the driver waited for me for several hours, the cost was only about $15. But I made the second trip the correct way, by bike. The first part is within the oasis around Dunhuang, but the second part is across the Gobi Desert, which is spectacular:

I hauled my bike a little ways off the nicely-paved road for a few additions to my growing collection of bike pictures:
  

My next stop was the ancient capital of Xian. Central Xian is surrounded by huge, thick walls, c. 1400, though covered with brick only later, and some portions also recently reconstructed:
  

  

    
As I discovered a few years ago in Rome, there is a particular romance in regularly biking through ancient city walls.

Among Xian's ancient monuments, I especially liked the Little Goose Pagoda:

Shanghai is enormous, and full of new construction. While not surprisingly, some of the new buildings are horrible, and form a distressing contrast with the older, presumably British, ones

  

I thought some of the new buildings were quite good, and that the average level of new architecture was higher than in the American cities I know:

However I also found a "crime against humanity" in Shanghai:


Bicycles have in fact been banned from many of Shanghai's busiest streets! Why must China make all the same mistakes that the U.S. has made — the switch to cars; the growth of suburbs; the indoor shopping malls. There are now even some SUVs. At least at present in Shanghai, there always seemed to be alternative bike routes a block or so away from the forbidden streets.

Beijing provided an opportunity for another bike picture:

The Forbidden City is interesting in part for the way its palaces and walkways line up, making a kind of architecture of imperial power:

At the northern end there's a great garden that includes rocks:


Though Hong Kong and Shanghai have some good modern buildings, the ones I saw in Beijing were almost all horrible:


On my last full day in China, I bicycled to the Great Wall at Huanghua. This is a better site than the more popular one at Badaling, or so I've read, because the wall at Badaling is actually a fake — a recent reconstruction. Huanghua is about 75 km from Beijing. The early part of the trip is on the service road of the Badaling Expressway, where the contrast between old and modern China was occasionally very visible:
  

  



The Wall at Huanghua is very ruined, with a big break where they hills are pierced by a stream. You can look alongside one ruined exposed section across to the other:


  

The flight from Beijing to Chicago (also non stop) took a different route, due to different winds, over the Bering Strait rather than the pole. This gave me some great views of Alaska and Canada's Northwest Territories:
  

Back in Chicago, a friend and I took a bicycle trip into the industrial areas of Northwestern Indiana, which have long fascinated me, and came across a scene even weirder than anything I saw in China:
  

It was good to see that at least in some areas, the U.S. is still Number One!